I am plodding through a field in heavy rain, wearing borrowed wellington boots, and my notes are bleeding into my notepad. Of all the environments in the world, this would rank bottom on a list of those likely to be associated with luxury foods. Yet here I am at the home of Exmoor Caviar, Britain’s first caviar farm.

The farm in Exmoor keeps between 20,000 and 30,000 Siberian sturgeons in huge tanks through which about nine million gallons of natural spring water from the River Mole flow every day. Caviar season on the farm runs from September to April, when the temperature of the water rises and the roe becomes overripe. The freshness of the water we wade through (and taste) is what Kenneth Benning, 38, the CEO of Exmoor Caviar, believes sets his caviar apart from foreign rivals.

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'The mouth of the sturgeon is at the bottom of its head, so they eat everything from the bottom of whatever body of water they’re in,’ he explains. 'If that water is stagnant, it will go into the taste of the fish and the caviar.’

Benning found himself in the luxury food business by 'mistake’ when, in 2001 the parents of a Ukrainian friend sent his family two half-kilo tubs of beluga caviar as a gift. Learning the caviar had cost only about $120 from the local market in Kiev as opposed to the thousands of pounds it would have cost in London, Benning, who worked in advertising sales, decided to set up London Fine Foods, an online shop for luxury food products, in 2003. Along with caviar he also sold goods such as foie gras and truffles sourced from wholesalers; the business now has a turnover of close to a million pounds.

But in 2009 he started to think about producing caviar in Britain. 'I met an Arabian guy who told me about the proper importing of caviar,’ he says. 'I realised there were all these farms in the world producing it, so why couldn’t we do it in Britain?’ He approached Patrick and George Noble, a father and son team who sold ornamental fish, including sturgeons, from their Exmoor farm, to help him. 'If you were starting from scratch you’d be waiting between 10 and 14 years before a return on your investment,’ Benning says. 'The difference with Pat and George is that the farm has been here since the 1950s; they already had the knowledge, the fish and the infrastructure.’ A year later Benning established Exmoor Caviar.

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Once the sturgeons are deemed mature they are placed in the purging tank full of clean spring water for 10 days, before being killed humanely. Then the caviar is painstakingly extracted by Patrick and George, using tweezers to remove any fatty tissue, before being salted and packed for transportation to London. 'We process eight to 10 fish per day, which is not a massive amount compared with other producers,’ Patrick says. The farm produces two different types of caviar – Cornish salted and Hebridean salted. 'The Cornish salt is a very wet salt and makes for quite a soft egg,’ Benning says. 'The Hebridean salt is drier, so makes for a more robust taste.’

They have just had their first season, in which Benning estimates they produced half a ton of caviar (Selfridges started stocking the product last month, along with London Fine Foods). Next season they aim to double that. But the team remains small, with four working in the London office and Patrick and George on the farm. 'Everything is done on a shoestring,’ Benning says. 'We had advisers who said, “You’ll never make money,” but it’s not about that. We want a very good product and you can’t muck around with caviar. It takes years to produce. As they say, a lifetime to produce it and a moment to savour it.’